Friday Five: Acquisitions, Olympics, and Sexism in the Advertising Industry

No theme this week. My heat-wave melted brain can only take so much, so instead of looking for five reads on a related topic, I’m sharing with you fives reads — on five issues — that I’ve been thinking about this week: HR tech acquisitions, Twitter’s censorship algorithm, the Olympics (naturally), and a new report on sexism in the advertising industry.

Yes, our favourite topic. Millennials. Samantha Allan writes that “Millennials are not some vast unsolvable mystery. According to a report from the U.S. Census Bureau (PDF), they earn $2,000 less than their parents did at a comparable age, they are more likely to live in poverty, and they are more likely to live at home.”

A new report reveals that during a 2015 Q&A with President Obama, Twitter was using a specially developed algorithm to censor abusive tweets. This raises questions about Twitter’s lack of response to users’ calling for better abuse prevention tools on the social media platform. Why, many will ask, were you able to filter out abusive tweets when the President was doing his Q&A, but you can’t do the same for everyday users being harassed?

Olympic fever has once again gripped the world — including your employees. Should you fight to keep your employees on task or should you let them go wild and watch the Olympics at work? Fast Company argues that some at work Olympic watching will actually be to your benefit.

A new report from 4A on sexual harassment in the advertising industry says that one half reported being harassed and one third reported being passed over on assignments because of their gender. In a op-ed timed to the report’s release, 4A’s President and CEO, Nancy Hill, wrote that “there are industry leaders out there who brush off gender and diversity issues; too many C-suite execs believe this issue is an isolated problem, one that doesn’t exist in “my house” or, remarkably, one that doesn’t exist at all.”

Another big HR tech buy this week, as Ranstad snapped up Monster. According to TechCrunch,

“For Monster, this is an important move to combine with a strategic and adjacent business at a time when companies like Recruit are dwarfing it in the pure-play recruitment space. The company is active in 40 countries, and had around 50,000 employers in its database according to its Q1 report. But in comparison Simply Hired alone (as one Indeed property) covers some 50,000 employers.”